[Poezje zebrane is a collection of sixteen books of poetry by Tadeusz Różewicz and] marks the thirteenth anniversary of Różewicz's emergence as one of Poland's outstanding postwar poets…. Różewicz was the first poet of his generation to confront the moral upheaval, the shattering of reality caused by the Nazi holocaust. His Niepokój (Anxiety; 1947) was the most outstanding postwar poetic debut. Rózewicz "the witness" became the conscience, the voice of a generation who escaped death while "led to slaughter" and the voice of the "gray man with a small stone-like and merciless imagination," obsessed with recording accumulated war images, bringing humanity to trial.

Różewicz's themes—martyrdom; the destruction of his small-town world, the center of stability; the guilt of man, stripped of humanity—required a new poetic idom. Różewicz's break with conventional poetics corresponds to the final break with the past. Stripped of metaphors and rhyme, his poetry "starts to live / in a primordial form." Each spoken word, endowed with "a hue of meaning," becomes a concrete building-block for a self-contained line of laconic monologue. Anxiety, the title of the first collection, is the underlying theme of Różewicz's entire oeuvre. Despite the unity of his poetic themes, creed and idiom, Różewicz's work does evolve. Later books show three variations of "anxiety" in response to "the rough embraces of reality."

Czas który idzie (Time Ahead; 1951), Równina (The Plain; 1954) and Poemat otwarty (The Open Poem; 1956) represent Różewicz's second phase, still moralistic and autobiographical but less obsessive, more objective and conciliatory. The anxiety-ridden hero of this phase seeks the stability of the vanished small town, clinging to the exoticism of artifacts at a fair but turning primarily to the center of his inner world. In "The Crystal Interior of a Filthy Man" we enter various layers of his soul, discovering progressively new moral and psychological contrasts. Irony, lyricism, grotesquerie and feeling accompany this process. In this landscape of his soul Różewicz's rare earlier moments of lyricism expand to lyrical events. The hero attempts to adjust to a normal life, creating himself and naming objects, much as did primordial man. Różewicz's block-like poetic idiom now becomes flexible enough to express a wide range of feelings.

The poet-moralist soon finds his hero's "stability" illusory. Anonymity threatens the hero, bringing the anxiety to its third phase, as in Głos Anonima (The Anonymous Man's Voice; 1961) and Nie w plaszczu Prospera (Nothing in Prospero's Cloak; 1962). Not finding "the center" of true stability at home, the hero ventures into the wide world, hoping to find at least the limits and meaning of life, thus breaking the umbilical cord to the past. Italy, the prototype of provincial beauty, replaces the loss of his hometown, returning him to childhood (cf. "Et in Arcadia ego"). Yet Różewicz confronts the modern dichotomy between Home and the World, now sharper than ever in history. He juxtaposes disintegrated values of Home with the artificiality of the West, whose exoticism and "Great Art" are like old decorations, finding common factors: both Home and the World are a heap of fragments and remnants. Modern man has exchanged ideology and passion for a "small stabilization" and anonymity. Man is manipulated by strings; his freedom of movement is illusory, like that of a pendulum or a circle. The anonymous hero assumes Różewicz's lyrical "I."

Having escaped provincialism, the hero expresses the shock of his Europeanization by a collage technique and a mechanical enumeration of various dictionary terms. The long poems have a mediumistic quality, mixing memoirs and journalistic observations in a hurried and breathless tone, dictated by the events of the moment. A seemingly chaotic flood of words replaces Różewicz's former conciseness, yet the words in the collage remain concrete. The mediumistic poetry seems to reflect the anonymous voice of the hero, though occasionally the poet's voice is discernable.

The hero's fourth stage of anxiety is caused by his tragic realization that one must not leave home, because everything must be interconnected (cf. "Non-stop-show"). Hence, he develops a yearning for a mythic lost paradise, rooted in Różewicz's biography. This yearning is expressed in Twarz trzecia (The Third Face; 1968), where everything is familiar, has its place and its name. Scared to swim into the future, he swims back toward the source, only to find that the source is within him. The movements of modern man are controlled; he can spit the hook out only together with his guts. Thus reconciliation and acceptance are the new reality of the modern antihero. The last mysterious region left for him is the human body, especially the microworld of female sexual organs (cf. "Regio"). Here the rhythm of the entrance and exit to the Vestibulum Vaginae corresponds to the pendulum movement of "the small stabilization" in the hero's life. "Cage 1974" compares the narrator's cage, full of excrement-like poetry, with a cage of silent birds. The narrator, like the visitors to his cage, describes his poetry as a secretion of blood and gall in stark, physiological language, extending the satire on the human condition. Skepticism distances the poet, giving him a wider perspective of the world and his poetry. He uses these stark, simple devices to return true meaning to the moral values.

Despite the openness of the emotional structure, the form of Różewicz's poetry is remarkably closed. His verse is an architectural structure built block by block, layer by layer, each an autonomous unit. The rhythm of Różewicz's poetry represents a new system, based on the intonation of the spoken language. He combines the rhythm of a choked voice with restless, fragmented sentences exploding with anxiety. This collection [Poezje zebrane] represents a passionately humanitarian, controversial, radically innovative poetry whose form adapts to Różewicz's creed and reflects his anxieties over the modern anti-hero's facing the conflagrations of contemporary history. (pp. 644-45)